Note: This guest blog post by Angelina Conti remembers another time when a nonviolent peace encampment was used as a tool for protest.

by Angelina Conti

When the Occupy Wall Street movement began in Zuccotti Park in September, I was surprised to find myself thinking about the Bonus Army and a lesson half remembered from a high school history class … something about veterans occupying the capitol, General MacArthur, and a fire.

The Occupy Together movement has spread to many other cities and finally is part of the mainstream national media. And I’ve done...

Note: This guest post by Paul Lacey reflects on the Occupy movement, its relationship to past movements, and the damage done by Wall Street. - Lucy

The Wall Street bailouts remind me of the sick joke about the young man who murders his parents then asks the judge for mercy because he is an orphan. No, I’m not laughing, either, but the application to Wall Street banking seems apt. First, there is the breathtaking gall and sense of entitlement of the big banks, the big traders, those who were too big to be allowed to fail. The free enterprise system, the...

Note: Here is a guest blog post by Cara Curtis, on the living experiment that is the Occupy Together movement. - Lucy

My hope for the Occupy movement is that we continue to live humanly. It has taken me a little while, though, to arrive at this articulation.

The first time that I visited Occupy Philadelphia, I found myself drawn to the physical space—called to stay and chat, to hold signs, to be with the other people around me—despite the litany of other activities I had planned for the day. It was not so much the messages carried by the other...

Note: George Lakey wrote this guest post days before Occupy Wall Street began. When I asked him for a submission, he offered this as it has something to say about the potential of the movement. - Lucy

by George Lakey

I’ve thought of a metaphor that throws light on the role of Barack Obama in relation to progressives. The man decided not to follow the path of Martin Luther King, Jr., or even Jesse Jackson, admirable prophets though they have been. He decided instead to be a pragmatic politician, doing as much good as he could from inside the structure. ...

To prophesy is not to predict, but to seize upon reality in its moment of highest expectation and tension toward the new.- Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

Dear Friends,

"... We are All Moses."

On what was perhaps the worst night of violence against peaceful demonstrators during the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square, I searched reports and images shared on Facebook and Twitter, blogs and news sites, poring over messages from friends in the Middle East. I tried like so many others to piece together a...